Browsing by Subject "education"
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(2021)Children have an intrinsic motivation to play, and play is an essential part of the versatile development of a child. A child learns, for example, social, emotional, motoric, and cognitive skills through play. The same skills are taught in Finnish schools. It is justifiable that play is a visible part of the Finnish elementary school curriculum, in which play is encouraged to be used as one of the methods in teaching. The significance of play decreases in the curriculum for the 3-6th graders even though that age of students are still children who play. The aim of this research was to study how play appears in 4-6th graders’ actions and speech in the school context, to give a voice to the school children. In addition, the aim was to study how play appears in learning and motivation, and how it appears in the building of the sense of community in a new group. This master’s thesis is qualitative research, and it is conducted through an ethnographic method. The data was collected from a class of 25 students in grades 4-6th in a Finnish ele-mentary school in August and September of 2021. The collected data had field notes, video material, photos, and interviews. The data was analyzed by coding it in themes to answer the research questions. The concluded themes discussed how play appeared in the school con-text and what kind of role play had in the building of the sense of community. The research results indicate that the students experienced play to be an inspiring and moti-vating way to learn. The students felt that play was a refreshing break from the ordinary book-oriented studying even though they were also studying while playing. The results also show that the teacher had a significant role in building both the sense of community and the learn-ing of the students. With the teacher’s support, the students learned while playing and had the courage to play with the classmates who they did not know before.
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(2020)Positive psychology in education is an ideological umbrella term for an educational approach that has an emphasis on the well-being and happiness of the individual. There are many schools that had elements from positive psychology before its creation but the first school to adopt a school wide Positive psychology in education approach in 2007 was Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, Australia. This study is a holistic approach with the attempt to understand how the teachers at Geelong Grammar School look at education and the students from a positive psychology perspective. A qualitative phenomenological hermeneutic research design was applied so that the focus could be put on the ten teachers lived experience in the school environment. Semi-structured interviews were used as a method to gather the needed data, which was thematically analysed. The results demonstrate how the teachers are impacted by the environment; the way in which the teachers deal with and view a very diverse group of students reflect the positive psychological perspectives. The teachers report clear benefits both in their class environment and also offers distinct tools in how they approach the students. Most of the teachers reported an individual benefit from a self-growth perspective. Geelong Grammar school does not demand a certain level of positive psychology, that choice is up to the teachers. This choice is reflected in the research results and shows how it impacts them personally in a positive way, and how they think it impacts the students. The results show both common universal challenges, typical for a school, but there are also challenges unique to the positive psychology environment they live in. This study facilitates the understanding of adopting positive psychology in education seen from the teachers perspective. This study also highlights some of the broader challenges in our culture and life dictated by the consequential demands of economics.
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(2024)The objective of this master’s thesis was to discover preschool teachers’ experiences with using music as an educational tool during preparatory Finnish language lessons. Language is a tool that helps humans connect with each other and their surroundings in a meaningful way. It is especially important for children who learn through play and interactions with others. Teachers and their pedagogical choices are in key position in supporting second language learning. Music has been found to be beneficial to second language learning. The significance teachers place on music as an educational tool can be observed by defining how and when they utilize music during language teaching sessions, and how they justify its use. The aim of this qualitative study was to discover personal motivation and experiences with using music as a teaching tool. Since the objective was to acquire the most valuable research results possible, the participants were chosen based on their personal knowledge and experience with using music during preparatory language teaching lessons in preschool. Seven qualified teachers were interviewed through semi-structured face-to-face interviews that were conducted in the summer of 2023. The participants all reported having had very positive experiences with using music as a teaching tool and having noticed significant benefits it has on second language learning. Participants had observed music impacting different areas of language learning, such as vocabulary recall, pronunciation, rhythm of language and sentence structuring. The impact was described as significant by the participants, which reflects findings of prior studies. Teachers valued its influence on supporting functions of learning such as memory, motivation and focus. Previous experiences with music seem to influence how comfortable teachers are with starting to implement music into their curriculum, and that support from colleagues has a vital role in encouraging its use. Having a teammate who has a strong background in music education was a key incentive that encouraged them to start utilizing it in their work, as it allowed new teachers to witness the effect music can have on language learning.
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(2023)Objectives. The research task of this study is to describe, analyse and interpret the use of “migrant student” and similar terms in two documents of an international intervention project, which aims to make assessment more equitable for “migrant students”. More specifically, this study aimed to answer the research question “In what manners is the migrant student positioned?”. Positioning involves the assignment of attributes to people, either to another individual/group or the utterer/their ingroup (Davies & Harré 1990). On top of assignment of attributes, naming and agentivising of “the migrant student” were considered to contribute to positioning, and were thus investigated as well. Methods. The material consisted of two documents, a grant proposal and an informational document for stakeholders, written by multiple authors, who are researchers. Documents were analysed with quantitative and qualitative means, namely frequency analysis of agent-verb-object combinations and discourse analysis. Both analyses drew from semiotics, semantics, and enunciative pragmatics. Results and conclusions. It was found that “migrant students” are consistently othered (Jensen 2011) - positioned as disadvantaged, incompetent and challenging. It was argued that the unfavourable positioning of the “migrant student” could serve to convince funders and stakeholders of the necessity and the success of the project, which is essential for securing academic funding. The implications of conducting educational initiatives that claim to advance equity for students, but simultaneously other them, were considered. It is suggested that academic othering may be necessitated by the structures that impact the agency of researchers. It is also recommended that future research not only explores academic othering in other academic genres, but also involves those in powerful positions in structures like universities.
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(2022)The meaning of this study is to find out how the pursuit of efficiency and education at univer-sities is viewed university students. According to the Finnish university act, the purpose of universities is to cultivate education and give the highest form of research-based education. The neoliberal educational policy has driven universities to an ever-increasing pursuit for effi-ciency, and the university has changed significantly during the 2000s, especially after the university act of 2010. The current state of university has been criticized a lot and the staff of universities have voiced a concern regarding the direction of the future of the university. This study examines how students experience the present university’s goals regarding efficiency and education. Nine students from the Faculty of Educational Sciences of the University of Helsinki partici-pated in this study. They have also acted as student activists which means that they have been in a student organization or have acted as a student representative in a body of the uni-versity. The data was collected by interviewing the student activists. The base of the inter-view was a background information form which asked students about their views of university studies. The data was analysed with theory-based content analysis. The results show that the pursuit of efficiency, education and their interweave occurred at university studies. The studies were considered easy, the university staff focused on their re-search rather than teaching and there was a strong encouragement to graduate in target time. These are examples of how the pursuit of efficiency rises up in studies. The values of educa-tion were shown in studies in the studies being in a good level of difficulty, the university staff putting effort into teaching and a trust in extensive possibilities of studying. The interweave of efficiency and education appeared for example through students aiming for a degree and ed-ucation at the same time in university studies. The university studies appear to have gotten new conditions that concentrate on performance-oriented studies. On the other hand, the studies seem to have signs of education and the students of educational sciences consider them to be important. Efficiency and education exist at the studies at the same time.
Now showing items 1-5 of 5